Dreamers have been getting short shrift these days. Instead of visionaries, they are seen as complicit sleepwalkers. Born in Limbe, Cameroon, Mbue — a resident of the United States for more than a decade — doesn’t let her dreamers off the hook. Far from it. Nor does she ridicule their deepest hopes.

It is not the bedeviling American dream that demands our affection and understanding here. Instead, Mbue insists, it the humans who dream it.